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THE MOVEMENT OF WHOLENESS
The Continuum of Change and Time
In the Greece of the fifth century B.C. Heraclitus gave a lasting formulation to what always had been the most common, basic experience of human beings — "The only thing that does not change is change itself." His contemporary thinkers apparently were so disturbed by his glorification of ceaseless change and all-consuming fire that they formulated opposite systems assuming a supersensible, non-existential realm of permanent entities and changeless order opposed to an ever-changing, illusory, existential realm. (The most famous is Plato's concept of a realm of archetypes or Ideas.) Human beings poignantly need the security of believing that order is a basic fact of the universe. But there may be order in unceasing change. In the continuum of changes, the possibility of persistent, quasi-permanent formations (that is, formations which are but relatively and temporarily changeless) is not only conceivable but a matter of common human experience. The truly significant problem of philosophy is to try to understand the facts of this common experience — not to evade it. Man might become fascinated by either the willfully, and tenaciously induced, rarified, and hardly formulatable experiences of yogis and religious mystics. Or he might be drawn to the equally stressful, intensely analytical, and disruptive methods of modern scientists who have forced themselves to ignore all that is not objective, material, measurable by highly complex machines, and expressible through the most involved mathematical symbols. Today attempts are being made to show that these two extreme approaches — that of the mystic yogi and the atomic physicist — lead to somewhat similar pictures (or "models") of the universe. Such pictures are scornfully opposed to the/'commonsense" picture of the world held by the immense majority of people in their instinctive demand for a simple, understandable realization of order and permanence.(1)
1. See, for example. The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra (Shambhala Publications, Boulder, 1976).
Scorning and undervaluing this commonsense picture may not, however, be the wisest thing. If this picture is naive and childlike in many ways, it is due to the narrow field of vision of most human beings (which is limited by the possibility of experience of the physical body, its senses and organs of action). Equally confining is the narrow focus of attention of most people and their even narrower ability to establish significant correlations between events and generalizations of sequences of happenings and interpersonal relationships, What is limiting and progress-deterring in a commonsense approach to reality is not its quality but its scope. The most important issue is not how the mind perceives but the way in which the field of perception is limited by the power of biological drives and the emotional responses elicited by the need to satisfy (or the frustration of) these instinctual impulses and psychic overtones. The basic aim of both the yogi and the atomic scientist is actually to transcend the biological level of the mind. The mystic does this by trying to paralyze, as it were, his "lower nature" (that is, his biological impulses and desires, especially for sex, food, sleep, human contacts, and speech); the scientist achieves the same end by distrusting his personal sense impressions and substituting intricate machines (whose objectivity he trusts), the assumed impersonality of statistics, and the abstract logic of mathematics.
If one could retain the quality inherent in the commonsense approach to reality — its livingness and warmth, and yes, its essential insecurity and mystery — while immensely broadening and giving new meanings to the frame of reference within which change is experienced, a significant world-picture would emerge. On its expanded and indeed all-inclusive basis, a new feeling of reality could inspire the creation of a culture far more wholesome and sane than the one whose origins go back to the Greece of the fifth century B.C. What was begun then at once led to such unsatisfactory developments that it had to be compensated for by the mass movement of a devotional and dogmatic Christianity, which in turn gave rise to the violent individualistic reactions of the Renaissance and the scientific empiricism and social materialism of recent centuries.
Such an expansion of the commonsense picture of the world neither can nor should ignore what has been revealed by, at one end of the spectrum of human experience, atomic science and modern astrophysics, and at the other, the intense subjectivism of Indian yoga. Extreme objectivity within a strictly materialistic frame of reference, and extreme subjectivity leading to an absolute or quasi-absolute denial of the reality of all but an inwardly experienced state of changeless Oneness, undoubtedly have engendered significant developments and realizations; but their integration within a much expanded commonsense picture of being transcending the realm of life instincts and personal-emotional impulses requires a new frame of reference. What is introduced here as the "Movement of Wholeness" is meant to be such a frame of reference. Within it, the primary and universal experience of change and the human yearning for order and permanence of structure (or "form") no longer have to be seen as irreducible opposites. There is order in change — cyclicity. Once this is accepted as the foundation of being, every conceivable approach to reality and every method for acquiring knowledge finds its significant place within the whole cycle of being and in relation to one another.
We begin with change because perpetual, unceasing change is the primary and most irrefutable experience of all human beings — of the writer, who is a human being conveying ideas born of his experiences to other human beings, and of his readers who, if they are intellectually honest, have to admit that nothing is more fundamental, more apparently incontrovertible, than the fact of perpetual, unceasing change. To exist means, first of all, to be part of a continuum of changes. The concept of Wholeness must be based on this fact. Therefore it must be a dynamic concept. Wholeness basically is experienced in terms of wholes of change — that is, in terms of cycles.
The problem which logically arises is to understand how the consciousness of a nascent human being passes from the experience of an indefinite and undifferentiated continuum of changes to that of a whole of change. This implies the realization of how the cyclic or periodic nature of change develops. This development occurs because an infant's mind soon becomes aware that some particularly striking experiences emerge out of the continuous sequence of impacts upon his senses and internal organic feelings with a distinctness which is remembered, though at first memory is only of an organic and cellular kind. What is more, these distinct experiences are repeated. Repetition and the feeling of repetitiveness is the foundation of what gradually becomes a sense of ordered sequence — a sequence of "events" to which specific characters are given by the infant's mind, which also makes repetitive events into entities and names them. The process of naming definitely increases the feeling that these entities are permanent, at least insofar as they perform the same type of actions and the senses register them as having the same "form." Permanence, form, structural order in the process of change — and an increasing sense that various actions fulfill purposes — objectify and "set" the consciousness of unceasing change. For the developing consciousness, entities which maintain the same form become persons and objects to which the child reacts and relates in particular ways and with which he or she seeks to communicate.
When the continuum of change is realized to be an ordered sequence of particularly distinctive and feeling-transforming events (the change from light to darkness, heat to cold, satisfaction to hunger, from a comfort-giving, pleasurable presence to solitude, and from noises to disquieting silence) the child sooner or later becomes aware that the sequence of events is rhythmic. He or she realizes that "periods" exist which are marked by important changes in the surroundings and in the behavior of people, and this realization gives rise to the sense of time. A series of changes occurs within a period beginning and ending with events which become markers of time.
Much has been said about time which makes little sense, because the distinction and relationship between time, as human beings experience it, and the continuum of change is so often ignored. However, this distinction must be made if we are to understand the concept of cyclicity, wholes of time, and how time is affected by the structure of a greater whole to which a lesser whole belongs by virtue of its participation in the existence of the greater containing it.
Time is the continuum of change as the consciousness of a particular person — and a collectivity of persons or a whole culture — experiences it in relation to a general or particular schedule of activities having to be performed. By the very fact of belonging to homo sapiens, a human being has a particular life span beginning with birth and ending with death. Therefore birth and death are the most significant markers of time for such a being, but many others also are established by the motions of the earth (days, months, years) and by definite biological, then social, and cultural transformations. Markers of time derive directly from the structure of any system of organization in which a person participates — as a member of the human species, a particular race, nation, social class, religion, family, even business firm or governmental bureau. Each greater whole imposes its special markers of time upon the individuals who belong to it because they play particular roles in it by performing regular series of actions. For example, in a family or factory a bell may ring to mark the start of the day, lunch time, or periods of work; in medieval culture church bells and town criers regulated the activities of every member of towns or villages. These socio-cultural regulations follow the biological, diurnal, and seasonal markers of time which result from the motions of the earth.
In other words, the manner in which a greater whole — cosmic, planetary, biological, or social — is structurally organized, and the number of actions and transformations which are expected of a person fulfilling a particular function in it between two successive markers of time, condition and often determine that person's sense of time. The person has "not enough time" to perform the actions (or interior transformations) required by the greater whole or by ambition to improve his situation in it — or conversely he or she has "a great deal of time." Thus the person perceives time as a commodity which is scarce or possessed in abundance. This commodity, time, depends on the relationship between a structural factor in a greater whole to which one belongs and the number of actions one wants or is expected to perform. Actually, when the greater whole is planetary or biological (and in ancient times when it was socio-cultural), the series of activities to be performed between two successive markers of time — for example, between sunrise and sunset, between one spring equinox and the next, and even more between birth and death — normally do not demand a feverish rush of activities (for which therefore it would be felt there was "so little time"). Thus human beings in the past felt time passing rather slowly. By contrast, in modern society, especially in business (though even in religious or spiritual spheres), where the drive to success, productivity, and profit (including "spiritual" achievements) has become abnormally intense and demanding, the individual never seems to have enough time. Mankind is driven at a feverish speed toward various kinds of successful (and dubious) achievements — and blames the pressure upon time. But the rhythm of planetary motion and the steady flow of the continuum of change has not accelerated. It is mankind which is rushing ahead, impelled by a philosophy of being — a Weltanschaaung and set of religious beliefs — which is essentially cathartic and out of tune with the rhythm of change. This disharmony exists because Western, Christian civilization has tragically opted for a world-picture featuring a straight-forward "historical progress" from barbarism to an ideal social and individual Utopia. Christianity violently rejected the concept of the cyclicity of change and of cycles of transformation and recurrence. It placed upon the period between physical birth and death an utterly unbearable burden of bio-psychic self-transformation — the neurosis-producing compulsion of being either saved or damned forever, that is, changelessly, absolutely.
The Movement of Wholeness as the All-Inclusive Cycle of Being
Living a rhythmic, unhurried, and steady existence illumined by a realization of meaning and value thus depends on the scope and inclusiveness of the frame of reference accepted by an individual — and even more basically in most cases by the culture to which he or she belongs. For this frame of reference is a determining factor in the relation between a clearly defined, repetitive section of the continuum of change and the number (and level) of the activities he or she has or wants to perform during that period.
For members of the human species living in tune with the rhythms of their natural habitat, the primordial and most fundamental repetitive, section of the continuum is the period defined by the daily rotation of the earth. This section divides itself into two more or less symmetrical periods, the day and the night. At the strictly biological level, each period is related to a specific mode of existence and type of activity and consciousness. There is a predominantly objective type based on the multifarious experiencing and working out of relationships (to a variety of objects and living beings as well as persons). Then follows (and precedes) a predominantly subjective type manifesting especially as sleep or, more generally, as rest and recovery from the stress and strain of physical (and/or mental) activity during the day-period.
When agriculture and animal husbandry became dominant concerns for stable communities, the cycle of the year, symbolized as well as measured by the calendar, came to control a larger schedule of activities. This cycle (established by the revolution of the earth around the sun) was subdivided naturally by the cyclic changes in the appearance of the moon — changes which were believed to affect deeply the processes of life (and even, later on, of personality unfoldment). Out of the combination of larger and smaller cycles, and of other periodic changes in the nocturnal skies, astrology was born. It served as an interpretation of the meaning of changes which could be referred to yearly biological cycles, and later to longer cycles in which the recurrent conjunctions and oppositions of planets, especially Jupiter and Saturn, acted as markers of time. The one great value of astrology is that it provides an interpretation of cycles of time which does not, of itself, imply that one half of the cycle is positive and the other negative. The repetitive cyclic pattern is produced by the interplay of two forces that are assumed to be equally significant; what changes cyclically is their relationship.
The relationship between two forces interacting within a whole of time generates constantly changing situations. The change is structured by the cyclic workings of the relationship. How the change manifests in terms of actual, experienced events is not revealed by the structure of change. An immense variety of events is possible, but their sequence and serial character are relatively permanent factors. They are relative because large and small cycles and sub-cycles always are interrelated, and because the interference of forces or entities operating in tune with higher magnitude (more inclusive) cycles in the occurrences of less inclusive ones is a possibility that should not be ignored (as we shall see in Chapter 12).
Astrology became widely misused because its cyclic foundation was not understood or was conveniently ignored by those who were concerned only with predicting existential events and favorable or unfavorable times to perform definite acts. The situation is actually the reverse; for what the knowledge of cyclic structure may reveal is what a particular phase of a cycle calls for in terms of types of events, rather than whether a brief, passing moment (or more broadly a particular phase) is favorable for a particular action. Astrology essentially deals with the structure of cycles — of wholes of time — not with concrete events. Moreover, it deals with time (as I have defined this term), not with the continuum of change itself, because the astrologer can be aware of this continuum only from the point of view of a human being on the surface of the earth. Moreover, the astrologer's awareness also is conditioned (in most instances) by the culture's particular approach to change and by the approach inherent in his or her temperament and personal character.
The condemnation of astrology by the councils and officialdom of the Christian world logically followed that of any cyclic interpretation of human existence and spiritual destiny. Instead, existence came to be considered a "historical" process starting with the creation of the world and ending in a glorious consummation, which Teilhard de Chardin envisioned as a supreme moment of total incandescence and spiritual oneness with the glorious Christ. At the individual level, existence was thought to begin with birth — a totally new beginning for a newly created soul — and to end in a death leading to a timeless ("eternal") blessedness, or perhaps to total failure in hell. History was conceived, ideally, as a one-directional process of spiritualization. But most historians of today are not concerned with the entire one-way process, leading up or down; they are interested only in gathering a mass of information about existential events which (they assume) reveal the mood of a particular generation, at most of a century, in a particular culture and religion (as James Joyce in Ulysses was concerned only with one day in the life of an ordinary man). Arnold Toynbee's attempt to discover a cyclic pattern in the structural development of "civilization" is now considered fanciful and unrealistic.
Nevertheless, the fundamental question is always, what is reality? For the materialist, it is a basically random sequence of events having no meaning in themselves or in relation to one another and leading to an unknown, perhaps unknowable conclusion some billions of years hence. For the mystical philosopher, reality is "Now" — all appearances absorbed into an ineffable, changeless state of unity. For every human being facing the unceasing continuum of change in the spirit of the philosophy of operative Wholeness presented in this book, reality is the Movement of Wholeness; it is the cycle of being, the foundation of the complex interplay of elements and ceaseless transformations of which what we call bodily existence is but a phase.
The hours of daytime also are but phases of the total situation caused by the rotation of the earth; and spring and winter, phases of the yearly cycle of seasons. Each noon presents to the consciousness at least slightly different causations, contacts, or feelings; the rose of this spring is not the same rose as that of a year ago. Yet the cyclic appearance of green leaves and rosebuds in the well-kept garden, and the fall of fragrant petals and brown leaves, can be understood on the basis of an annual process of growth and decay — and only on such a basis. What is understood, however, is the structure of the process. The knowledge of cycles of change is a structural type of knowledge. It does not reveal the details of existential facts or "actual" events, only the way they are related sequentially to one another and (what is more) related to a much larger cycle of being. In the case of the roses this would be the cycle of vegetation produced by the rotating motion of the earth, which is a planetary (not merely biological) factor.
The cycle of being of which this book speaks is the largest conceivable cycle of activity; not only of activity but also of consciousness. All wholes of activity possess a degree of consciousness. There is no absolute non-consciousness, any more than there is nonbeing or non-motion. Change necessarily implies motion, provided we do not limit the concept of motion to physical motion in an objective, measurable space. In this sense change is unceasing. It is, I repeat, a continuum of motion; but the consciousness of every whole reacts to and interprets this continuum according to its own particular nature and capacity to interpret, understand, and attribute meaning. Every whole of being makes of such a continuum a structured series of repetitive changes, a series limited by the beginning and end of the integrated existence of the whole.
When human consciousness is dominated by, because it is an expression of, biological processes, birth and death are the beginning and end of an integrated condition of wholeness at the physical level of earthly existence. The development of socio-cultural and mental activities adds the realization of personhood to that of conscious being as a physical organism. But according to the collective mentality of Western society, the feeling-realization of being a person also begins at physical birth and ends at physical death. For some Western religious minds, this death is followed by a mysterious and essentially incomprehensible state of being which never ends. This state is one of absorption in or total rejection by (in hell, as a state of being) a God whose being is ineffably and incomprehensibly beyond change, even if (irrationally!) He also is believed to be able to act yet remain absolutely unaffected by His actions. From such a point of view, one cannot speak meaningfully of a cycle of being, only of a progressive development from a period of formation "out of nothing" (ex nihilo) to a state of more or less absolute transcendence of existence as an integral whole.
While the philosophy of operative Wholeness is based on the cycle of being (the Movement of Wholeness), it considers the state of objective, measurable, physical existence only one half of the whole cycle of being. It is "one half" in an abstract sense, not in terms of a quantitative, physical measurement of time. However, the other half of the cycle should not be considered nonbeing or non-manifestation. Rather, it is a period during which activity and consciousness are predominantly subjective, just as they are predominantly objective during the half-cycle human beings experience as physical existence. Both periods can be understood if we accept the dualism of objectivity and subjectivity as a permanent feature of the cycle of being. We can logically do so because a dualism is present in the condition of being experienced by all men and women — and in the whole of nature. This dualism manifests most obviously in the two states human beings experience daily, waking consciousness and sleep — and even in the contrast between activity consciously focused on a physical (or intellectual) task and a state of unfocused consciousness (day-dreaming) or passive openness to the flow of change (a state in which the sense of time becomes equally unfocused, which does not mean that time has vanished).
Popular Hinduism speaks of the Days and Nights of Brahma, the Creative God; philosophers, of periods or states of manifestation and non-manifestation. In terms of their particular type of consciousness, each refers to what I call the cycle of being in which being oscillates between the two poles represented by the principles of Unity and Multiplicity. Thus the cycle of being inevitably divides itself into two hemicycles, each dominated by one of the two principles. During one hemicycle, the trend toward Multiplicity is dominant and the power or influence of the principle of Unity wanes; this is the hemicycle of multiple beings which in their totality constitute the physical universe perceived by the predominantly objective consciousness of human beings. It can be conveniently symbolized in terms of human experience as the Day period of activity and consciousness. During the other hemicycle, the symbolic Night period, the principle of Unity and the trend toward oneness dominate. The physical world ceases to exist, but "being" always is. It is in a condition of predominant subjectivity which is prefigured in the human condition of sleep or intense meditation. I have called the state of being to which it refers inistence — the polar opposite of existence.
Perhaps a more accurate symbolism than Day and Night would relate the interaction of the two principles. Unity and Multiplicity, to the interaction of the Chinese principles Yin and Yang. For Chinese philosophy makes very clear that these two principles operate within the circle of wholeness, Tao, and that they are not only constantly interrelated but interpenetrating. The black form of Yin has a white "center," and the white form of Yang, a black one. Moreover, Yin and Yang, like the principles of Unity and Multiplicity, both operate simultaneously, but in ever-changing ratios of proportional intensity. Indeed, the philosophy of operative Wholeness I present is probably closer to the spirit of Chinese philosophy than to the Hindu, although it includes elements from both approaches. Nevertheless, the more Western symbolism of Day and Night is adequate if we remember that while light and darkness are "eternal" (that is, cyclic) opposites, they coexist.
What human beings call death is simply the transition from the Day state to the Night state. It is merely a marker of time which, for a physically embodied human consciousness, indicates a radical change in the experience of the continuum. This change is drastically important, tragic, and frightening to human beings solely because the human consciousness, having built a powerful image of itself as a subject — the utterly precious and worthwhile "I" — fears seeing the realm over which it autocratically ruled disintegrate into seeming nothingness. The fear persists even though what occurs is that each of the constituents of the realm goes its own way; they are scattered but not annihilated. At least some of them will return and reintegrate under the reign of a new, perhaps more worthy "king" of the same dynasty (as we shall see in Chapter II when we study the concept of reincarnation).
A human being is a whole, not a "one," and both principles, Unity and Multiplicity, are active in this whole. A human being in his or her wholeness (a person) is both a subject and an object. The statement that a person is both a soul and a body says the same thing within a religious frame of reference. For the religious person, the soul — as a subjective factor in total being and personhood — is the being's most important and valuable component; but (as we shall see) this importance is given because mankind belongs to the last portion of the Day period of the cycle of being, when the power of the principle of Unity is waxing and catching up to the intensity of the principle of Multiplicity, which is in retreat. Thus to increasingly experience and aim at achieving a subjective state of unity is the dharma — the essential function — of mankind on this planet and in our universe (for there may be other, different universes). Religion, inasmuch as it seeks to unify human beings — which, however, it actually does only within the narrow limits of particular cultures, institutions, and dogmas, which exclude all unbelievers — is in tune with the present trend of the continuum of change. So are meditation processes and all aspirations toward an ideal of unity. But if we want to understand why this is so and what occurs if we do not align our wills, minds, and daily behavior with this progressive one-ward trend — and if we allow the still powerful principle of Multiplicity to successfully oppose the natural trend toward Unity during this period of the earth's evolution — we have to develop a focus of mind and intuitive understanding that is more encompassing than that of the religions of particular, exclusivistic cultures.
Thus the Movement of Wholeness as the cycle of being is the foundation of a commonsense approach to being — to the very fact of existing — which must be accepted now that the basic issue facing mankind is the global integration of all human beings within a truly planetary sense of community. This requires a structure of organization broad enough to find a place, value, and meaning for all manifestations of human consciousness. Mankind needs an all-inclusive frame of reference, a total affirmation of being. For we must think not only of the trend toward Unity and thereby negate, violently oppose, and try to exorcise the still powerful principle of Multiplicity. Instead, we have to develop an all-inclusive consciousness that can deal intelligently with all components of personhood — a consciousness of operative Wholeness. This consciousness will be free from the particularity of only a moment of time, a fugitive now, because it has experienced and constantly retains the memory of the Wholeness of the cycle of being. Such an ideal and truly holistic human memory retains the experiences of the Night period as well as those of the Day; it remembers what comes between the small sub-cycles of embodied personal existence, just as during the embodied cycle it is fully aware of the transitions between waking consciousness and sleep.
Through powerful experiences of Wholeness, the person, aware of the totality of the spectrum of its being, actually becomes Wholeness in operation. Even though the person is but a brief moment in the cosmic cycle of being, the consciousness identified with Wholeness can accept not only all that came before that moment and all that will follow; it can also accept the Whole in a total affirmation of all-inclusive being. It experiences what "is" in terms of the cyclic wholeness of the Whole, thus sub specie aeternitatis — the true meaning of eternity (before it was perverted by the early fathers of the Church) being the Wholeness of a cyclic movement (an Eon). In this realization, even if it is only mental, there can be inner security and peace. Such security is not apart from the changes and tensions implied in the state of existence, but lies in the incontrovertible realization of the dynamic harmony of opposites operating in the Whole. Neither Unity nor Multiplicty is emphasized, neither the subjective "I" nor the objectivity of the complex relationships that fill the state of embodied existence. Peace is poised in their unceasing interplay — established in Wholeness.
An individualized person can, however, resist the unceasing, driving force of the Movement of Wholeness. He or she can cling to the particular form his or her selfhood has taken — because the form is pleasurable and beautiful or because the ego is afraid of being unable to cope with the change. The individual seeks to immortalize moments of fulfillment or even in some cases a familiar pain with which the ego has become identified. All negations arise out of fear. To overcome this fear, to allow the flow of the Movement of Wholeness to move one's entire being, even though the mind can not yet picture the "where to": this is the constant challenge facing the individualized, self-conscious person. Such a challenge can be met more readily if the mind understands where the individual stands in the vast cycle of being — not only where he or she stands as an individual, but where humanity as a whole and his or her culture stand. Knowing where one stands not only illumines the path just ahead; it also helps one understand how this position has been reached and therefore how the fear of change can be overcome most logically and consistently.
To willingly and affirmatively accept one's position in the largest whole to which one can deeply feel one belongs, to allow the power of the Movement of Wholeness to drive one step by step — this is the meaning of spiritual living. No step can be missed, however difficult it may seem. Every step is inherently difficult because it means renouncing a lesser form of stability in order to gain a greater realization of Wholeness. In the process, an experience of instability must be met — with courage as well as faith.
Probably the majority of human beings need to believe in a personal God to sustain such a faith. God is the divine Father or Mother for whoever still functions mainly at the biological level of wholeness and consciousness. For the person whose relative sense of isolation seeks solace, God is the supreme and utterly dependable "Thou" to Whom the distraught "I" may turn for reassurance and inner strength. If a conscious and autonomous individual can respond to the idea of a total affirmation of being throughout the vast cyclic process of the Movement of Wholeness — is able to experience Wholeness as a dynamic Presence in all there is and can ever be — the realization that one belongs to a far-reaching greater Whole in whose field of existence one lives, moves, and has one's being can be a profoundly sustaining as well as enlightening factor in the inner life.
In that greater Whole the individuals who see themselves also as individualized wholes — lesser wholes — can accept their function "in the Name of" Wholeness. The individual is Wholeness operating within a definite, and therefore finite, field of activity and consciousness. The individual is his or her dharma or position and function within the greater whole; but he or she is also Wholeness operating in and through this particular position or stage of the great cycle of being. The individual is not only an efficient performer of a definite (thus finite) role in the field of activity of the greater whole; in and through the individual as performer, Wholeness (or "beingness") is affirming itself in a particular mode.
To the conscious and enlightened performer, the performance is but one fleeting phase in the cyclic Movement of Wholeness. He or she is that phase, yet more than that phase because the all-inclusive reality of being is the rhythmic Movement — and the performer is aware of this. The performer is the moving, and in and through the performance, the performing. To use a musical metaphor, the person is not only a bassoonist playing a C-sharp written in the score of a symphony, but also "Music" being performed in terms of the culture's approach to it. This cultural approach, in turn, represents one of the many ways in which "Music" cyclically makes use of sounds.
In the great Movement of being, every performer is Wholeness in act. The human mind that has passed through the process of individualization and has learned to play its part should experience itself performing in the symphonic wholeness of the most inclusive whole in which it is able to effectively participate. It may progress from a small instrumental group in a college to a large metropolitan orchestra. But whether the orchestra is small and part of a learning situation or a magnificent organization of perfect performers, "Music" can still be experienced and realized in the performing. Each tone may be produced "in the Name of" Music. Every human life likewise can be lived "in the Name of" Wholeness. It can be Wholeness in act, operative Wholeness.(2)
2. One may relate such an approach to life to the Hindu concept of karma yoga in its most inclusive aspect. Jnana yoga, on the other hand refers to the attitude promoted by the "contemplative tradition" particularly dominant in Hinayana Buddhism and Zen. This tradition stresses meditation as the one means of reaching an increasingly subjective state of consciousness. In its extreme form, such an approach leads to the "paralyzing" of the bio-psychic and mental instrumentalities of perception, feeling, and cogitating — thus of the means of contact with and response to the world of objectivity and multiplicity. The ideal result is the attainment of samadhi or nirvana. At the level of universal being, this is a state approaching that of the Godhead. Yet it is not an "absolute" state. A third approach is bhakti yoga, the path of devotion to a relatively or absolutely supreme person, a "self-realized" guru or Lord God Himself. The drive toward a state of unity which is as complete as possible takes the form of total identification with an intensely unified center of consciousness, or rather, it takes the form of quasi-total absorption into the circle (mandala) controlled and integrated by the power and will of this center. These three basic approaches may to some extent be blended, yet one of them normally prevails.
To be thus established in Wholeness requires a lucid understanding of the two principles that operate in the Whole — in any whole. It requires an inclusive realization of the forces interacting throughout the cyclic Movement of Wholeness, so that as human beings we can properly evaluate our place within this Movement. Through such an evaluation we can then understand the part in the vast process of being we are called upon to play, according to the time and place of our existence. In such an understanding the individual comes to know and to accept his or her dharma or "truth of being." And in the fulfillment of this dharma, Wholeness reveals itself to itself through the individual's whole being. In this revelation there is, indeed, security and peace.
